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'She died a brutal, painful, horrific death'

By Lisa Redmond, lredmond@lowellsun.com

Updated:
12/04/2012 06:34:28 AM EST

LOWELL -- As The Ngoc Tran repeatedly used a rubber mallet to fracture his wife's skull and face, prosecutor Lisa McGovern said the 62-year-old Lowell man stuffed toilet paper in his wife's mouth to muffle her moans of pain while he continued to beat her.

"She (Son Tran) was moaning, so this defendant stuffed toilet paper in her mouth to quiet her. Then he resumed beating her until she was dead," McGovern told a Lowell Superior Court jury Monday during her opening statement.

Son Tran received "dozens and dozens of bruises, abrasions and fractures from the blows from the mallet," McGovern said. "Son Tran was alive for all those injuries.

"She died a brutal, painful, horrific death," McGovern said.

When Lowell police arrived, they found Tran sobbing on his living room couch. He burst out, "I killed my wife. I killed my wife," McGovern said.

Tran, formerly of 34 Walnut St., is on trial facing charges of first-degree murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in the April 28, 2011, murder of Son Tran, his wife of 30 years.

While defense attorney Debra Dewitt declined to give an opening statement Monday, she has suggested that Tran, a native of Vietnam, was suffering from depression and severe financial stress after he and his wife became unemployed.

After allegedly killing his wife, Tran made a failed attempt at suicide by electrocution.

McGovern said Tran had verbally abused his wife.

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"He took out his unhappiness on her," she told the jury.

In the spring of 2011, the couple's financial stress "stoked his bitter anger" when husband and wife were unemployed, as was their oldest son who was helping them pay bills.

The dam of anger finally broke one afternoon when Son Tran, who had been controlled by her husband for years, opened a letter addressed to her from Mass. Health without her husband's permission, McGovern said.

Tran became so angry, berating his wife to the point that his daughter, for the first time, stuck up for her mother.

"That set him off," McGovern said. For a week, Tran refused to speak to his wife.

Son Tran had had enough, McGovern said. Son Tran made plans to leave her husband, either moving to Texas to live with a friend or move in with one of her four children.

The Ngoc Tran was "well aware of his wife's plans," McGovern said. And "he made plans of his own."

Before killing his wife, McGovern said, he waited until one of his daughters had left the house to return to Holy Cross College in Worcester, then wrote a five-page letter to his children.

In the letter, Tran allegedly wrote about how unhappy he had been and that he hadn't been treated the way he should be treated, especially by his wife, McGovern said.

In the letter, Tran accused his wife of "poisoning his children against him," calling her a "terrible mother with a terrible heart," McGovern said.

Then he posted signs around the living room warning people not to come near for fear of electric shock.

While his wife was in the bathroom, Tran went down to the basement and returned with a mallet, attacking her "again and again and again until she died," McGovern said.

Tran then changed out of the clothes soaked with his wife's blood into clean clothes, McGovern said.

His plan, McGovern said, was to bludgeon his wife to death, then commit suicide by electrocuting himself using a broken electric cord. But all he managed to do was to give himself a tiny burn mark, she said.

As his wife lay in a pool of her own blood on the bathroom floor, Tran made several phone calls, telling his family, "I killed my wife."

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